Kicking & ScreamingFew could have predicted that Bill Murray, Jim Carrey, or Adam Sandler would ever be taken seriously as actors, so hear me out when I say that Will...Kicking & ScreamingComedyLeo Benvenuti, Steve RudnickPT90MPGFew could have predicted that Bill Murray, Jim Carrey, or Adam Sandler would ever be taken seriously as actors, so hear me out when I say that Will...2005-05-11Mike DitkaRobert DuvallRachael HarrisMike Ditka, Robert Duvall, Rachael HarrisUniversal

Few could have predicted that Bill Murray, Jim Carrey, or Adam Sandler would ever be taken seriously as actors, so hear me out when I say that Will Ferrell, over the next decade, could make a similar transformation. You get the latest hint of that deeper, committed talent — the humanist behind the prankster’s mask — in Kicking & Screaming, even if the movie itself is just a klutzy, broad, and genially dumbed-down kiddie-sports comedy. As Phil Weston, a wimpy suburban vitamin salesman who becomes the maniacally competitive coach of his 10-year-old’s soccer team, Ferrell takes a character who was probably never much more than a concept on a screenwriter’s Post-it note and invests it with a buzz of desperation and anger, a mild-guy-goes-nutzoid arc it scarcely deserved.

Playing Phil the emasculated New Millennium Dad, ridiculed by his macho-jock father (Robert Duvall), Ferrell makes himself into the clown prince of girlyman domestic masochism. When Phil’s own son, Sam (Dylan McLaughlin), joins the Tigers, a team of local losers, Phil steps forward to coach, if only because no one else will take the job. Attempting to whip a bunch of outcasts — a worm eater, a hippie nerd, and so forth — into shape, he guzzles coffee the way that Beavis once did cappuccino, using the caffeine high to catapult himself into a kind of tough-dad catharsis. Ferrell weeps like a baby; he bares his jelly belly in a tetherball death match; he vents the frustration of the damned by spitting out phrases like ”mother of pearl!”; he even blurts ’90s techno-pop so that the soundtrack doesn’t have to. Kicking & Screaming may be a prefab cartoon out of the Bad News Bears cookie cutter, but Ferrell doesn’t just save this junk — he rules it.